Proposed Constitutional Amendments

I am proposing the following constitutional amendments.  Many would not have been necessary had Americans understood and lived by the principles of the Framers of the Constitution.  Given decades of ignoring the Constitution and a huge excess of laws, regulations, and government spending, I think these amendments would go far in correcting the many problems we have with excessive, tyrannical government.

Good law requires that the welfare of every individual is increased by the law.  For this reason, it a super-majority of individuals do not approve of a law or a regulation, it should not become law or it presently law, it should be repealed.

My amendments are:

1) Amend the 16th Amendment authorizing an income tax to state that one and only one marginal tax rate will be applied to incomes equal to 75 percent of the median taxable household income and all higher taxable household incomes.

2) Repeal the 17th Amendment requiring the popular election of Senators.  Return to the original election of Senators by state legislatures.

3) Every adult owns his own mind, body, and labor and may use them, maintain them, and dispose of them as he pleases, so long as he does not initiate the use of force upon others.    Individuals have the right to protect their minds, body, and labor from violence.

4) Every adult has the right to the results of his labor or thought and to his property.  The goods he has made, the land he has improved, and the ideas he has originated and put into the form of a product or process are to be protected from theft by government.  No government taking of property is permitted except with just and reasonable compensation or because that property was used by the owner in the commission of a crime as determined by trial.  No government taking of property not used in the commission of a crime is allowed except for necessary and proper government use.

5) Every adult individual has the right to associate with others for the purposes of his choosing in voluntary relationships, contracts, and trading.  Adult individuals have the right to exercise their own judgment in their associations, contracts, and relationships with others.  Government will protect individuals from violence and fraud which has actually happened or is in the process of happening, but will not limit the freedom of association out of fear of potential future violence or fraud.

6) The government does not control or manipulate the economy or trade and commerce.  It provides a constant value supply of currency for government functions and general use, but does not prevent the circulation of other distinctive currencies.  It forbids state and local governments from interfering with trade, commerce, and travel by the People across state boundaries.

7) Individuals have the right of privacy so long as they are not engaged in acts of violence or fraud.  Information not available to the general public will not be collected and saved about any individual without a court order attesting to the reasonable likelihood that the individual is engaged in violent acts or fraud.  No means of obtaining private information on individuals will be used without due process.

8) Any law or act of Congress may be repealed by a vote of 40% or more of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The President may not veto such repeal votes.

9) Any law or act of Congress requires a vote of 60% or more of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The President may use his veto power on such acts of Congress.  The same 60% approval is required for all Executive Branch appointments reviewed and consented upon by the Senate.

10) Any member of Congress who has voted for a bill must attest in a written document that the member has read the bill and believes it to be in the interest of the general welfare, necessary, proper, and constitutional.

11) Any federal law may be repealed by act of 40% or more of the state legislatures.

12) Any regulatory rule by an executive branch agency of the federal government may be nullified by votes of 40% or more of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by 40% or more of the state legislatures.  Any new regulation produced by a government agency which will impose costs of $25 million or more must be specifically approved by both the House of Representatives and the Senate with votes of 60% or more.  Any legislative attempt by Congress members to review any regulatory ruling which has the support of 40% of the members of that house cannot be kept from a vote in that house.

13) No federal law shall exempt members of Congress or federal government employees from its application to them, except by an explicit and recorded vote in favor of such an exemption by at least 80% of the members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

14) No member of Congress shall serve in Congress more than 12 years continuously and no more than 20 years in a lifetime.  After 12 years of service, there must be at least a ten-year period of non-service in the federal government before further service commences.

15) Senators and their staffs will be paid by the state they represent.  Senators will not receive any payment or benefits for services, nor will they receive any payments or benefits after the termination of their service, from the federal government.

16) Members of the House of Representatives will not receive any payments or benefits from the federal government after the end of their service in the House of Representatives.

17) Authorizations for the existence of each and every executive branch agency or department must be renewed by an individual, specific act of Congress every four years for that executive entity.  The budget for every such agency or department must be individually reviewed and approved at the same time.  Congress will also at that time review and evaluate the actions of that agency or department over the last four years and make that review available to the public, with only national security exceptions upon the vote of 60% or more of the members of each house of Congress.  If Congress does not authorize the agency or department and its budget individually on this four-year cycle, all operations of that agency or department must cease at that time.

18) No appropriations may be made by any Congress which are binding upon any future Congress.

19) Decisions of the federal courts may be overturned by a vote in both houses of Congress of two-thirds of the members of each house.  Federal court decisions may be overruled by two-thirds of the states by acts of their legislatures.

20) Annual federal government spending may not exceed a fixed percentage of the annual national gross domestic product except in times of declared war and then by no more than half the annual cost of that war unless both houses of Congress approve such additional spending with a vote of 80% or more.  The upper limit fixed percentage will initially be 18% and will be decreased by 0.5% with each new Congress, until it reaches 8% of gross domestic product. 

21)  Annual federal government spending may not exceed government revenues by more than 3% except in times of declared war and then by no more than half the annual cost of that war unless both houses of Congress approve such additional spending with a vote of 80% or more.

22) Total government debt may not exceed the annual national gross domestic product except by the vote of 80% or more of the members of each house of Congress.

23) No one may vote in a federal election unless they present a valid picture identification at the time of voting.  Only federal employees on duty outside the United States of America may cast their vote more than 2 weeks prior to the day of the election.  They may not vote earlier than 6 weeks prior to the election.

I plan to revisit these proposed amendments to discuss them in more detail.  I am sure that some of them need to be tuned up and I will welcome comments with suggestions on how to do that.

Did you do your required federal reading today?

The annual report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on the state of federal regulations called Ten Thousand Commandments for 2010, written by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. notes that:

• The Code of Federal Regulations is now over 157,000 pages long
• 3,503 new rules went into effect in 2009
• That is a new regulation every 2.5 hours every day, all 365 days of the year

For the last decade, the number of pages in the Federal Registry, where new regulations are published, has averaged 73,018 per year.  This would suggest the Code of Federal Regulations should have grown by 730,177 pages in the last decade, but apparently many of the older regulations are replaced by the newer ones.  Fortunately!  The following plot comes from the CEI report:

Most of these regulations provide for fines, penalties, and even jail sentences should they be violated.  Ignorance of the law is no defense in our courts of law.  That may have made sense when the laws were simple enough that an ordinary American could be expected to know the law and the regulations, but I am betting that, like me, none of my readers have read all of these regulations.  Therefore, you and I are under constant threat of fines, penalties, and jail time for breaking regulations we know nothing about.  The situation is even worse, since our state and local governments are also busy writing laws and regulations.

Since we have not read these regulations, I suppose we are supposed to consult with a lawyer before we undertake any action at all.  In fact, we have to consult with a lawyer in many cases before we do not take any action at all!  But this volume of regulations is so large that no lawyer knows the entire width and breadth of these regulations either.  So, they specialize in portions of the regulations, such as bank regulations, or import regulations, or export regulations, or farming regulations, hiring and firing regulations, or gaseous emissions regulations.  So, before we undertake any action, we need to figure out how many lawyers with how many specialties we need to consult.

There are a lot of Americans who have not read 157,000 pages in their entire lives.  I surely have, but very, very little of my reading has been federal regulations, despite having worked for the Dept. of the Navy for 10 years and the Dept. of the Army for 19 months.  I certainly did not read my 9.6 regulations today that I should have read.  Now, some of you will say that surely we do not have to read all of these regulations.  We can just skim through their titles and judge whether they will apply to us.  After all, many of us are not farmers.  But, a regulation on the use of fertilizers aimed mostly at farmers, might in some cases affect those of us who fertilize our lawns and gardens.  Or, we might buy an item from an importer who is not allowed to import that item.  Are we then guilty of purchasing contraband and subject to penalties ourselves?  In many such cases we are at least likely to lose our investment in the item, since it can be seized by law enforcement authorities.  We are not talking about cocaine here, which we all know to be illegal.  But, you had better be careful which flowers you buy that have been imported.  A man has been in prison for two years for not filing the necessary paperwork to import some unusual flowers.  He claims he did not know he needed to do this and there is plenty of reason to believe his import effort was small enough that this was likely true.

Now behind the huge flood of regulations is the Congress that no longer listens to the American People.  It passes bills, many of which are 1,000 or even 2,700 some pages long.  Those Congressmen voting for these bills do not read them, even though their oath of office makes reading them their duty because they are supposed to only pass laws that are constitutional and also meet the requirement of promoting the general welfare.  Apparently, one of the reasons that most Congressmen do not care whether their laws are constitutional or not is because if they did care and if they did their duty to the Constitution, then they would have to actually read all of the laws they vote for!  Ugh..... how boring.  It is so much more rewarding to be wined and dinned by constituents and special interests who are imploring you not to hurt them or who are trying to bribe you into giving them a special benefit.  Yes, at those dinners the money just flows in for your next re-election campaign.  Who cares whether you have actually read the bills you vote for?  How many Congressmen have lost their re-election campaigns to-date for that reason?

Then these thousand page plus bills call on the various executive branch agencies to create the new regulations to deal with hundreds of issues.  The recent Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 was more than 2,700 pages long and called upon the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services alone to create rules and regulations 137 times.  Many other federal agencies were given new responsibilities and many more new agencies were created.  This will call for many, many more new regulations.  Many of these regulations will presumably apply to the many Americans who will be forced to buy the mandated health insurance and who will receive the more rigidly regulated health care also mandated in the bill.  It appears inevitable that we will be held responsible for knowing all or many of these new regulations.  Since the health care industry is one-sixth of the economy, everyone in that industry will have to know a lot more about these upcoming regulations than the average patient will have to know.

Of course we are all pretty busy as it is.  So how on earth are we going to have the time to read all of these federal, state, and local regulations?  For one thing, there ought to be a law that no vehicle can have a radio or play any CD which is not encoded by the government as an official government law and regulation CD.  When driving, we shall be required to listen to audio readings of the laws and regulations of that area of the country we are in.  If we are pulled over for any reason, law enforcement should immediately check that we have the required CD in our government-mandated CD players.  Those too poor to have a CD will be required to apply for a federal subsidy for the purchase of the mandated CD player.  Before graduating from high school, every student must have read every law and regulation applicable to his area prior to two weeks before his graduation date and pass tests on those laws and regulations.  Once a year, every resident of the United States will go to the Department of the Laws and Regulations and pass a test on the body of the current laws and regulations including all new regulations and laws issued up to two weeks prior to that annual renewal date.

That, of course, is the socialist response to this problem.  My response is this:  It is perfectly clear that we have far, far too many laws and regulations.  The logical consequence of having laws and regulations is that we must read them and understand them.  If the burden of reading them and understanding them is so great that it cannot be consistent with our general welfare and it is an unreasonable infringement of our individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then all laws and regulations in excess of such a reasonable limited number, must be unconstitutional for that reason even if some small fraction fall within the powers actually granted the federal government by the Constitution.  This is because any law passed by Congress must meet both of the following requirements:

• It must be the exercise of one of the few powers given to Congress in the Constitution.
• It must also be consistent with promoting the General Welfare.

The Constitution does not even provide for regulations issued by the executive branch.

Of course, the interpretation of the Progressive Retrogressives differs with mine.  They say it may either be an explicitly enumerated power or it may be anything they choose to claim is for the General Welfare.  This is nonsense for many reasons, but one of them is the reason we are examining in this post.  If the power of government is to do anything it says is in the General Welfare, then the rules, laws, and regulations will quickly become unknowable, unintelligible, and overwhelming in their demands for reading time!  This is clearly inconsistent with the General Welfare being claimed.

Good Law Should be Understood and Enforceable by Government

It used to be often remarked that good law must be readily understood by the People.  Perhaps an understated further principle of good law is that it should be readily understood and be practically enforced by the government.  There are other principles of good law, but most of those are covered by our Constitution, so we can summarize them by simply saying Constitutional Law.

At many levels today we have problems with the law being understood by government.  At the very most basic level, it cannot be said that Congress understands the bills it votes on to become law.  First, our Congressmen do not read the bills before they vote on them.  When they do read the bills, they do not understand their implications and effects upon The People in most cases.  In many cases, they rely on government agencies or the courts to give the vague laws meaning.  Finally, many enforcement agencies do not understand the laws either.

The Monday, 26 October 2009 Washington Times has an editorial with an enlightening illustration of how little the government understands the laws or is able to apply them.  In particular, it deals with the tax credit for first time homebuyers of 2008 and 2009.  This case illustrates problems that tax filers had as well, but more egregiously it shows how well the IRS understands the law.

It has been found that the IRS gave the tax credit to 580 taxpayers younger than 18 who could not sign the contracts legally to buy a home.  Some were as young as 4 years old.  The IRS granted $4 million of such tax credits.

The IRS paid out $139 million to almost 20,000 returns to people who had not bought a house, but said they planned to do so in the future.  Then there was the $480 million in tax credits given to those who have previously owned homes as indicated on prior returns by prior mortgage interest deductions, prior deductions for closing points or the residential energy credit.

Because the tax credit was increased from 2008 to 2009 from $7500 to $8000, many people declared only for the $7500 amount in 2009 and lost $500 because the IRS did not want to correct their returns.

This is just one overly complex tax law among many.  Then there are those hopelessly complex laws on pricing in the market.  There are the many overly complex regulations and accounting practices.  All intrusive government means government which deluges citizens and bureaucrats both with too many and too complex laws for them to understand or apply. 

A Modest Proposal for Congress

I have a modest and very responsible proposal for Congress. It is also very simple.

No Representative of the House and no Senator shall be allowed to vote in favor of a new law unless he signs a sworn affidavit that he has read the bill completely.

He may vote against a bill without such an affidavit, since it is reasonable not to pass a bill whose supporters say it will do something which the legislator thinks is wrong or since he may have read a portion of the bill which is so wrong that it is clear the bill should not be passed into law.

Of course, I would ideally like to require that he also make a clear statement for the record as to what power granted to the Congress allows Congress to make such law. He should be required to show that the law is not unconstitutional as well. If he claims the law is in the interest of the General Welfare, then he should also have to show what listed power of Congress allows him to act in the General Welfare by passing the law.

Now I understand that in the present climate of political unthought, it will be very unlikely that Congressmen will limit their laws to the scope of their actual Constitutional powers. But, it would be something if we could at least get them to swear that they read it. Then, at least they would not defend themselves as not responsible for some of the great foolhardiness in many of their laws by saying that they did not know what the law was doing because they did not read it.

Proposed laws should also be posted on the Internet for a week before they are voted on in Congress so the public can review them for Constitutionality, graft, and general stupidity.